Sampling rate offsets (SROs) between devices in a heterogeneous wireless acoustic sensor network (WASN) can hinder the ability of distributed adaptive algorithms to perform as intended when they rely on coherent signal processing. In this paper, we present an SRO estimation and compensation method to allow the deployment of the distributed adaptive node-specific signal estimation (DANSE) algorithm in WASNs composed of asynchronous devices. The signals available at each node are first utilised in a coherence-drift-based method to blindly estimate SROs which are then compensated for via phase shifts in the frequency domain. A modification of the weighted overlap-add (WOLA) implementation of DANSE is introduced to account for SRO-induced full-sample drifts, permitting per-sample signal transmission via an approximation of the WOLA process as a time-domain convolution. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in the context of distributed noise reduction for the estimation of a target speech signal in an asynchronous WASN.
This paper argues that the symmetrisability condition in Tyler(1981) is not necessary to establish asymptotic inference procedures for eigenvectors. We establish distribution theory for a Wald and t-test for full-vector and individual coefficient hypotheses, respectively. Our test statistics originate from eigenprojections of non-symmetric matrices. Representing projections as a mapping from the underlying matrix to its spectral data, we find derivatives through analytic perturbation theory. These results demonstrate how the analytic perturbation theory of Sun(1991) is a useful tool in multivariate statistics and are of independent interest. As an application, we define confidence sets for Bonacich centralities estimated from adjacency matrices induced by directed graphs.
We provide new analytical results on the uplink data detection in massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with 1-bit analog-to-digital converters. The statistical properties of the soft-estimated symbols (i.e., after linear combining and prior to the data detection process) have been previously characterized only for a single user equipment (UE) and uncorrelated Rayleigh fading. In this paper, we consider a multi-UE setting with correlated Rayleigh fading, where the soft-estimated symbols are obtained by means of maximum ratio combining based on imperfectly estimated channels. We derive a closed-form expression of the expected value of the soft-estimated symbols, which allows to understand the impact of the specific data symbols transmitted by the interfering UEs. Building on this result, we design efficient data detection strategies based on the minimum distance criterion, which are compared in terms of symbol error rate and complexity.
Data-driven offline model-based optimization (MBO) is an established practical approach to black-box computational design problems for which the true objective function is unknown and expensive to query. However, the standard approach which optimizes designs against a learned proxy model of the ground truth objective can suffer from distributional shift. Specifically, in high-dimensional design spaces where valid designs lie on a narrow manifold, the standard approach is susceptible to producing out-of-distribution, invalid designs that "fool" the learned proxy model into outputting a high value. Using an ensemble rather than a single model as the learned proxy can help mitigate distribution shift, but naive formulations for combining gradient information from the ensemble, such as minimum or mean gradient, are still suboptimal and often hampered by non-convergent behavior. In this work, we explore alternate approaches for combining gradient information from the ensemble that are robust to distribution shift without compromising optimality of the produced designs. More specifically, we explore two functions, formulated as convex optimization problems, for combining gradient information: multiple gradient descent algorithm (MGDA) and conflict-averse gradient descent (CAGrad). We evaluate these algorithms on a diverse set of five computational design tasks. We compare performance of ensemble MBO with MGDA and ensemble MBO with CAGrad with three naive baseline algorithms: (a) standard single-model MBO, (b) ensemble MBO with mean gradient, and (c) ensemble MBO with minimum gradient. Our results suggest that MGDA and CAGrad strike a desirable balance between conservatism and optimality and can help robustify data-driven offline MBO without compromising optimality of designs.
To improve how neural networks function it is crucial to understand their learning process. The information bottleneck theory of deep learning proposes that neural networks achieve good generalization by compressing their representations to disregard information that is not relevant to the task. However, empirical evidence for this theory is conflicting, as compression was only observed when networks used saturating activation functions. In contrast, networks with non-saturating activation functions achieved comparable levels of task performance but did not show compression. In this paper we developed more robust mutual information estimation techniques, that adapt to hidden activity of neural networks and produce more sensitive measurements of activations from all functions, especially unbounded functions. Using these adaptive estimation techniques, we explored compression in networks with a range of different activation functions. With two improved methods of estimation, firstly, we show that saturation of the activation function is not required for compression, and the amount of compression varies between different activation functions. We also find that there is a large amount of variation in compression between different network initializations. Secondary, we see that L2 regularization leads to significantly increased compression, while preventing overfitting. Finally, we show that only compression of the last layer is positively correlated with generalization.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. For instance, in autonomous driving, we would like the driving system to issue an alert and hand over the control to humans when it detects unusual scenes or objects that it has never seen before and cannot make a safe decision. This problem first emerged in 2017 and since then has received increasing attention from the research community, leading to a plethora of methods developed, ranging from classification-based to density-based to distance-based ones. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection in terms of motivation and methodology. These include anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). Despite having different definitions and problem settings, these problems often confuse readers and practitioners, and as a result, some existing studies misuse terms. In this survey, we first present a generic framework called generalized OOD detection, which encompasses the five aforementioned problems, i.e., AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD. Under our framework, these five problems can be seen as special cases or sub-tasks, and are easier to distinguish. Then, we conduct a thorough review of each of the five areas by summarizing their recent technical developments. We conclude this survey with open challenges and potential research directions.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
Stickers with vivid and engaging expressions are becoming increasingly popular in online messaging apps, and some works are dedicated to automatically select sticker response by matching text labels of stickers with previous utterances. However, due to their large quantities, it is impractical to require text labels for the all stickers. Hence, in this paper, we propose to recommend an appropriate sticker to user based on multi-turn dialog context history without any external labels. Two main challenges are confronted in this task. One is to learn semantic meaning of stickers without corresponding text labels. Another challenge is to jointly model the candidate sticker with the multi-turn dialog context. To tackle these challenges, we propose a sticker response selector (SRS) model. Specifically, SRS first employs a convolutional based sticker image encoder and a self-attention based multi-turn dialog encoder to obtain the representation of stickers and utterances. Next, deep interaction network is proposed to conduct deep matching between the sticker with each utterance in the dialog history. SRS then learns the short-term and long-term dependency between all interaction results by a fusion network to output the the final matching score. To evaluate our proposed method, we collect a large-scale real-world dialog dataset with stickers from one of the most popular online chatting platform. Extensive experiments conducted on this dataset show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for all commonly-used metrics. Experiments also verify the effectiveness of each component of SRS. To facilitate further research in sticker selection field, we release this dataset of 340K multi-turn dialog and sticker pairs.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a hot research topic recently. GANs have been widely studied since 2014, and a large number of algorithms have been proposed. However, there is few comprehensive study explaining the connections among different GANs variants, and how they have evolved. In this paper, we attempt to provide a review on various GANs methods from the perspectives of algorithms, theory, and applications. Firstly, the motivations, mathematical representations, and structure of most GANs algorithms are introduced in details. Furthermore, GANs have been combined with other machine learning algorithms for specific applications, such as semi-supervised learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning. This paper compares the commonalities and differences of these GANs methods. Secondly, theoretical issues related to GANs are investigated. Thirdly, typical applications of GANs in image processing and computer vision, natural language processing, music, speech and audio, medical field, and data science are illustrated. Finally, the future open research problems for GANs are pointed out.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.